


crazy: a tragedy in three parts

by onekisstotakewithme



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon Era, Chance Meetings, Episode: s08e17 Heal Thyself, Episode: s11e16 Goodbye Farewell and Amen, Hook-Up, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mild Smut, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Queer Themes, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-28 22:06:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17795609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onekisstotakewithme/pseuds/onekisstotakewithme
Summary: The charming man Hawk met in a Tokyo bar has been replaced with a scared kid who’s lost his mind.





	crazy: a tragedy in three parts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flootzavut](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flootzavut/gifts).



 

**I. Tokyo, 1950**

 

Hawkeye's deep into his fifth martini when he looks up to see that he's alone.

Trapper's taken off, no doubt with a pretty nurse on his arm, off to forget his wedding vows in a dark hotel room, in the company of a woman who isn't his wife.

And a woman who is decidedly not Hawkeye.

He's left Hawk here alone, to listen to the jukebox in a seedy back alley bar in Tokyo, where he's hardly likely to pick up a nurse.

Or a sailor.

"Excuse me," comes a voice from beside him, and Hawk looks over to find  himself staring into the deepest pair of brown eyes he's seen this side of the Pacific. "This seat wouldn't happen to be taken, would it?"

"No, it's open for business. As am I." He cringes the second he says it, because this is a serious misstep.

"You don't look like a business girl," the man says, grinning, and Hawk relaxes by increments.

"Oh, I assure you," Hawk tells him, pushing aside his martini to drink in the man instead. "I am entirely business. Why do you think I'm here?"

"You're not a soldier?"

"I consider myself more of a high end rent boy being _rented_ by the army."

"I wouldn't think they could afford you," the man says, chuckling. "But then all of us soldiers are chronically underpaid."

"Can I buy you a drink?" Hawk asks. "Mr...?"

"Call me James," he says, shaking Hawk's hand and giving him a grin. "Do you have a name or does that cost extra?"

Hawk laughs. "Anyone ever tell you you're very cute?"

"Not recently."

"Well." Hawk grins. "Oh bartender! Two martinis here, for myself and the cute one. And if mine isn't dry as mummy dust, try again."

The bartender nods, and Hawk turns back to James, before hesitating.

He knows where this is headed, and he's certain that James isn't this man's real name, but two can play games, and Hawk prides himself on imagination. "Jonathan Tuttle," he says, and it only stings a little bit, in a way that feels like revenge on Trap. "Where have you been this whole war?"

He's really saying ‘ _Come back to my hotel’._

James tilts his head. "Oh, a little of this, a little of that. I'm too pretty for combat."

Hawk abandons his martinis for a strange man's favours, and they head back to the hotel.

*

They’re barely in the door of Hawkeye’s hotel room before his mouth is on James’s, hot and needy, pushing him up against the door, clutching his hands in a Hawaiian shirt nearly as gaudy as his own.

"Damn it," James says, pulling away. "You _kiss_ like a rent boy."

"How would you know?" Hawk asks, grinning.

Instead of answering, James kisses him back, his own hands quick and nimble with the buttons of Hawkeye's shirt, tossing it aside, and Hawk can't help a whimper as he presses desperately into the light touch.

"This is crazy," James says, pulling back with a grin.

"What about this place isn't?" Hawk asks in return, tugging James to the bed.

"Good point," James says breathlessly, in between kisses, and he gasps in the right way when Hawk kisses his way down his neck.

This is the kind of love born in dark hotel rooms in the middle of the night, the kind that sours by the time the sun comes up, and Hawkeye is ready to punish himself with soft hands against his skin where he's used to callouses, and maybe it is crazy, but God, it's too good for him to care.

"Oh God, James. Oh Christ."

"Do I-" James bites Hawk's ear, laughs when he shudders, "look like- a chaplain- to you?"

It's too gentle, the whole thing is soft, James handling Hawkeye like something delicate, in danger of shattering, but his touch is sure and his skin hot, his body willing, and Hawk may not be a rent boy, but he's sure putting out like one.

It ends up being fast and hot and leaves Hawk lying in a dizzy heap with James curled on top of him, and when James brushes hair back from Hawk's forehead, it's so tender that he could cry.

And when he wakes up briefly the next morning, James is stroking his skin and murmuring the names of bones and muscles to himself in the six AM dim.

When Hawkeye wakes up again, James is gone, and Hawk goes to find Trapper, eager to patch up whatever dumb argument it was that had sent Trap running the night before.

Trapper doesn't ask where Hawk was, just tucks into breakfast.

Maybe it's dangerous, and maybe it's crazy, but Hawkeye likes the feeling of being seen.

**II. Uijeongbu, 1952**

Hawkeye forgets sometimes how crazy life in South Korea can make people.

After all, insanity is contagious, it’s Korea’s version of the common cold, and even the overt crazy becomes background noise, something that Sidney Freedman is called in for, but is otherwise sidelined.

There’s too much pain here to focus on just one kind.

Until their replacement surgeon for Charles and Potter arrives.

“Gentlemen, I give you Doctor Newsome,” Klinger says.

Hawkeye turns to shake his hand, distracted (like always) by BJ, and then has to stop for a second, because he’s looking up at James.

He simply grins, and offers a hand. “Hi! He’s BJ, and I’m Hawkeye.”

He turns back to the game he and BJ are playing with a nonchalance that could be enviable, because this is _crazy_ , how did one drunken hookup from two years ago end up being the same surgeon sent to help out?

This is confirmation: Hawkeye was born under a ladder.

“Oh that’s catchy,” Newsome says, walking in. “My name’s just plain Steve.”

BJ saves the day without realizing it. “Just Plain, I can’t tell you how glad we are to see you.”

He turns to shake Newsome’s hand, and Hawk takes the opportunity to bat their inflated glove past BJ.

“Ha! 21-15!”

Klinger is still talking, and Hawk answers automatically, but he can’t help watching Newsome, wondering if the jig is up, and then wonders if the man even remembers him.

Judging by the guarded look on Newsome’s face, he knows exactly who Hawkeye is.

So Hawk picks his favourite weapon: the still. “Doctor,” he says, pouring a drink. “Your opportune arrival calls for a celebration.”

“You uh…” Newsome eyes him. “Make your own?”

BJ swoops in again, not realizing the mental tennis match the other two are engaged in. “Yeah, we call it Moonshine over Korea.”

“Mm- oh.” Newsome doubles over. “Now I know what the corporal is spraying the office with,” he says, breathless. He straightens. “Quite a lovely spot you have here.”

“It’s not much,” Hawk agrees. “But we like to call it hell.”

Newsome nods, and things go back to the regularly scheduled crazy, and Hawk breathes a sigh of relief that Newsome hasn’t given him away.

Until that relief turns into worry, and then into fear, when Newsome ends up on the floor in Potter’s tent, rubbing at unseen spots of blood like a bespectacled Lady Macbeth, and the charming man Hawk met in a Tokyo bar has been replaced with a scared kid who’s lost his mind.

“It’s crazy,” Hawk murmurs, as Sidney drives away with Newsome. “That could have been me.”

“Huh?” BJ asks from beside him.

“Nothing, Beej. We should uh… we should get some rest. Long day today, long day tomorrow.”

“Every day is long in Korea,” Beej tells him, clapping Hawk on the shoulder. "C'mon Hawk, I’ll buy you a drink."

But there’s a lingering unease that Hawkeye can’t shake, almost like the insanity is contagious. If Steve can't wash off the blood, Hawk can't quite wash off the crazy.

“Am _I_ crazy?” he asks BJ.

BJ shrugs. “Aren’t we all mad here?”

Hawk rolls his eyes, ignoring the twinge of guilt. “Very cute, Alice. Let’s go.”

**III.  Tokyo, 1953**

There are so few things Hawkeye is certain of anymore.

_My name is Benjamin Franklin Pierce. I go by Hawkeye._

_I was in Korea._

_I’m crazy._

But no matter how often he repeats it to himself, curled into a ball on his bed, as the bars on his window leave stripes on his bed in the moonlight, it never quite sinks in.

He knows he’s crazy, so doesn’t that make him saner?

And no matter how often Sidney pesters him, he still doesn’t know why he’s here.

He doesn’t know what straw broke the camel’s back, and with how violently his mind recoils from the very idea, he isn’t sure he wants to know.

Sidney is relentless, but Hawkeye is stubborn.

Until he sees a familiar face in the funny farm.

A pair of glasses that catch the July sunshine, hands that still rub absentmindedly at unseen spots of blood.

“Steve?” Hawk asks.

Steve turns, his face blank, and then he smiles. “Hawkeye!”

Hawkeye isn’t sure why he’s relieved that Steve remembers this name instead of the fake one.

Thinking of Tuttle would be too much right now.

“Hawkeye,” Steve says again, and frowns. “What are you doing here?”

“Search me, fella,” Hawk tells him. “What about you?”

Steve shrugs, his eyes wandering. “It’s the blood, Hawkeye. It still won’t come off.”

“Yeah, buddy,” Hawk says, watching Steve walk off. “I know.”

He glances down at his own hands out of reflex, and finds them clean but shaking.

“Hawkeye!”

Hawk turns, only to find Sidney walking towards him. “Hiya Sid.”

“Is something wrong?” Sidney asks, as he gets closer.

“Wrong? What could possibly be wrong? I’m stuck in the funny farm, in the middle of a war, thousands of miles from everyone I know and love-”

“That’s not what I meant, Hawkeye. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Y’know Sid.. I’m not so sure I didn’t. See a ghost I mean.”

“How so?”

“Well… I just saw Steve Newsome.”

“Uh huh. And that worries you?”

“Sid, shouldn’t he be home by now?”

Sidney shrugs. “I tried to get him discharged when I realized there wasn’t much more we could do for him. Army eighty-sixed my request.”

“But he’s clearly not getting any better,” Hawkeye says, staring in Steve’s direction. “In fact, in my unprofessional opinion, he’s almost worse.”

Sidney sighs. “Look, Hawkeye, it’s not as easy as it sounds. He’s not a broken-down jeep, we can’t just replace a part and send him on his way. The mind is more delicate than that. And we’ve had a hard time getting through to him. He just… won’t let us help him.”

“So he’s chicken.”

“We all have things we’d rather not face, hard truths we find hard to acknowledge. Even you, Hawkeye. You have to be willing to be helped before I can help you. Steve hasn’t gotten there yet, but you will.”

Hawkeye thinks of the 4077, of the friends he’s left behind now that he’s flipped. “It’s not that easy, Sid. You said so yourself.”

“I know. I didn’t go to psychiatrist school to make it easy. Just easier. Please, Hawkeye.”

“Sid, forgive me, but what’s the point? Steve is proof you don’t come back from crazy. It’s not like the common cold.”

“Hawkeye.”

“What?”

“You and I can do this. So what do you say you trust me, and we get you home in something resembling one piece?”

Hawkeye blinks at him for a second. _Home_? Home is a place he made up in Korea to keep from going crazy.

Home is Maine, his father… no, home is a crummy canvas tent in a mud puddle. Home is a place he’ll never see again if he doesn’t get better.  

“Okay Sid,” he says at last. “Do your worst.”


End file.
